All news on this page courtesy of the The Times & Sunday Times Newspapers, London, UK
2 March 1997
PRESSURE grew last night for the government to compensate hundreds of service personnel afflicted by "Gulf war syndrome" after driving Saddam Hussein from Kuwait six years ago.
The cross-party Commons defence select committee meets on Wednesday amid indications that even its Tory members favour a payout to the worst afflicted Gulf veterans. A total of 1,228, just under 2% of the British force, have lodged complaints after suffering a variety of debilitating disorders.
The MoD denies Gulf war syndrome exists, and says the veterans are suffering different illnesses likely to have different causes. Its officials and ministers also deny any misuse in the Gulf of dangerous organophosphate pesticides, one possible explanation for widespread illness among veterans.
But Tory, Labour and Liberal Democrat members of the select committee remain suspicious. They are to draft a report which will criticise Nicholas Soames, the armed forces minister, and Richard Mottram, the MoD's permanent secretary, who were subjected to a two-hour grilling by the committee last week.
Tories on the committee have told friends they do not rule out going further and calling for compensation. Menzies Campbell, the sole Liberal Democrat member, said he favoured an MoD payout, and added: "I should be very surprised if several of my colleagues did not take a similar view."
A Tory source said the committee would also unite in criticising the performance of Soames and Mottram, who had to explain last week why they spent years denying that organophosphates were used, only to change their tune late last year. One Tory committee member has told friends: "I am unconvinced by Nick Soames's performance. He was squirming."
He also said committee members were "furious" that Mottram "arrogantly tried to instruct us in which questions we were entitled to ask and which ones we shouldn't ask".
Ten people in the Surgeon General's office at the MoD are under investigation over why there was a delay from June to September last year in telling Soames of evidence that organophosphates were used to control pests in the Gulf.
The Sunday Times has uncovered new evidence that there could have been misuse of organophosphates in the Gulf on a significant scale.
A senior source has disclosed that British forces took more than 3,000 litres of the organophosphate Fenitrothion with them to the Gulf. This was sprayed in tented areas but ran out by January 1991. Thousands of litres of another organophosphate, Neocydal 60 EC, were then purchased locally and sprayed in the same way.
The source, who risks prosecution under the Official Secrets Act, insists that this was a huge error, committed because the instructions on the Neocydal 60 EC flasks were printed in Arabic.
It was not until after the war ended that the medical hygiene teams responsible for the spraying realised it was an organophosphate. The source says that the spraying teams took no precautions because they had been told the sprays were harmless.
| Top of Page | Current Section Index |
|---|